The Advantages of WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular Content Management System (CMS). With around 74,652,825 sites using WordPress (at time of writing), it accounts for a wopping 18.9% of all websites on the net.

There is a good reason for this extreme popularity, WordPress is extremely user friendly. It’s logical intuitive arrangement makes it easy for non tech savvy users to add and edit content and arrange different areas of their website. And luckily this doesn’t come at the cost of any functionality. From a background perspective WordPress is built for the modern internet, it is light on server reasources (helping pages load quickly), and comes with standards compliant code which makes everything run smoothly and search engines crawl the content easily.

WordPress started out purely as a blogging platform and evolved into a fully fledged website software. It’s strength still shows through as it’s ability to easily publish content and for that content to easily be found and arranged via a system of categories and tags. It’s publishing system also makes the meta data easily accessible to help with search engine optimisation.

There are a multitude of free and commercial themes available for WordPress which can provide a massive head start in getting a website to look the way you want it to. Read more on the pros and cons of pre-made themes here. It also comes with a plethora of extensions, or plugins which extend its functionality in many ways e.g. ecommerce selling software, events calendars, content arrangement plugins and many more.

The down side of this is that the various pieces of software are regularly being updated to offer new features and patch security weaknesses – therefore WordPress and its plugins must be regularly updated.

While WordPress provides a quick easy solution to most website needs, there are a few guidelines as to whether it is best for your requirements or not:

When to use WordPress for your website –

You want to publish and edit your own content.

You want a quick start theme based website which comes pre-packaged with all modern web features.

You need full blogging features.

You need online selling functionality.

You need features such as contact forms, calendars, content search, revolving sliders etc.

When not to use WordPress for your site –

If you have a custom design in an unusual layout. It might be difficult to manipulate WordPress templates into unusual layouts. Sites like this would be best coded straight into HTML.

You have a simple site with static content that isn’t likely to need changing very often. It is best to straight code this in HTML as well, this way you don’t have to worry about software updates.